Fourth in a series of studies on Psalm 51
by Keith Bassham
Not long ago, I read an article in which the author asserted that early Christians did not sing many hymns, and in fact, according to the author, Christian hymns only began to appear about 400 years into the Christian era. I think that was a misstatement.
We have an interesting insight in the form of a letter from a Roman governor of Pontus and Bithynia from the second century. This was one of the areas addressed by the Apostle Peter in his first epistle. If you recall, those “strangers” Peter addressed were under stress because they had become so changed by their experience with Christ. It appears the persecution and suspicion continued beyond Peter’s time, because years after Peter had written his letter, the Roman governor Pliny wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan, and in that letter he described some activities of the Christians in answer to accusations against them:
“They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food — but ordinary and innocent food.”
It may just be me, but when I read “… accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god,” I am inclined to say that Christians were indeed singing hymns. They were meeting and singing hymns to Christ, and this is the earliest historical reference to Christian singing outside the Bible itself. What types of hymns did they sing? Not what we think of today certainly. But some Bible students think we actually have an example of a Christian hymn in Paul’s first letter to Timothy 3:16:
And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness:
God was manifest in the flesh,
justified in the Spirit
seen of angels,
preached unto the Gentiles,
believed on in the world,
received up into glory.
Those words, they say, were quoted by Paul from a Christian hymn of the day.
I say that if you look at that very closely, you can see a rhythm and cadence, and perhaps even the basis for a Christmas carol: God was manifest in the flesh. And here’s another possible hymn from the letter to the Philippians 2:5-8:
Let this mind be in you,
which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God,
thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation,
and took upon him the form of a servant,
and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man,
he humbled himself,
and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.
In the Ephesian and Colossian letters, Paul tells the earliest Christians to speak to themselves, that is, to speak among themselves, in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs. It may be that very few were written, but most people hardly ever saw anything in writing, and they learned mostly from what they heard. At any rate, we do know that for early Christians, especially those who came from the Jewish faith, their hymns were likely psalms.
And among the 150 psalms we have in the Bible, Psalm 51 is one of seven penitential psalms, that is, the words in the psalm are those of a person who is sorry for moral or covenantal failure. If Psalm 51 were set to music, it would have to be in a minor key for much of it — it is a prayer of confession and forgiveness, and that was the title of a previous lesson in this series: “We Need Forgiveness.” Another thing we have learned is that the psalm has a back story, and the back story is identified in the inscription: “To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”
This was the reason why David composed a penitential psalm. He was sorry about his failure as a child of God, especially when we consider his overall record: David had a lifetime of noble service to God, doing the right thing, acting in an honorable fashion even when being pursued and hunted down by his predecessor Saul. But there is an asterisk in the record in 1 Kings 15:5, where the Bible records, “David did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord, and turned not aside from any thing that he commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.” And this psalm, according to the inscription, is the result.
In verses 1-5, the psalm begins with a cry for forgiveness, emphasizing the urgency of the situation with a series of cries for God to do several things: have mercy, blot out, wash, and cleanse — mercy and blotting out for the transgressions, washing for iniquity, and cleansing for David’s sin.
We said that David did not ask for justice. He asked for mercy. Justice, in the case of adultery and murder, would be capital punishment. God in His justice would have been justified (you see the similarity of those words?) if he had struck David dead. David needed forgiveness, and we need forgiveness.
But at some point in Psalm 51, the key would have to change from a minor to a major, and maybe even modulate it a step or two as we moved from forgiveness to renewal, and finally to restoration, the subject of this lesson. Mercy and forgiveness removes the guilt of sin. Renewal replaces the sin with a desire to do right. You cannot be satisfied with just a canceling of the debt of sin, David needed an inner renewing, something to cause a desire for God to replace a desire for sin, and that results in restoration.
Again, we can reference the Ephesian and Colossian letters where Paul instructs Christians to put off old behaviors, and to put on new ones. And as we will learn in this lesson, restoration that comes after forgiveness and renewal is the result of a series of trade offs such as we read in verse 12: “Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.”
This trading off is the key not only to getting forgiveness, not only a renewal — which just gets us back to where we were — but a true restoration, where we have built in guards and protections to keep us from the sin and to help us guide others.
In Matthew 13, we have what we call the parables of the kingdom, and in those parables we have the stories about a pearl of great price and a treasure hidden in a field. In both of those parables, the idea the Lord passes on to us is that there are some things that are so important and so valuable that you rightly give everything you have in exchange for them. It’s the same idea that Paul had in Philippians 3 when he say’s he is all in for the gospel. He will do whatever it takes to advance the gospel; he will pay any price.
If you don’t have that mindset, you will never get to the point David is at in this psalm. What would he give at this point to go back in time and make that whole Bathsheba thing go away? And remember, right now he does not know what the next ten years holds for him, but we do. God isn’t going to just walk away and leave David on his own to figure things out. David is in for ten years of heartbreak and shame and personal defeat and family failure, one disaster after another, the consequences of those things that were ruling him during his time with Bathsheba and Uriah. God will put pressure on him to continue making necessary changes. What would he trade to avoid that?
This whole thing reminds me of something Jesus said in Luke 14. Remember how he says one must “hate” all one’s family members and one’s own life also, must take one’s cross, and must forsake all one owns or one “cannot be my disciple.” Dallas Willard calls attention to this type of spiritual discipline in his Renovation of the Heart. The entire point of this passage is that as long as one thinks anything may really be more valuable than fellowship with Jesus in his kingdom, one cannot learn from him. People who have not gotten the basic facts about their lives straight will not do the things that make learning from Jesus possible and will never be able to understand the basic points in the lessons to be learned.
Willard says it is like a mathematics teacher in high school who might say to a student, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, except thou canst do decimals and fractions, thou canst in no wise do algebra.” It is not that the teacher will not allow you to do algebra because you are a bad person; you just won’t be able to do basic algebra if you are not in command of decimals and fractions.
You have to get some basics down just to be able to see what it is like to have a restored walk with God. It is precisely what the persons with the pearl and the hidden treasure did. Out of it came their decisiveness and joy. You have to build in spiritual disciplines — time with the Word, prayer time, worship time, even silent time — and at the same time intentionally sacrifice entertainment time, and money, and even those things that Christians don’t think are all that bad, if you want to move into this territory. If you go back and read the Puritans and the earlier Baptists, you will find they had found ways to build in spiritual disciplines, things that today would be called ritualism or legalism, but they understood that you had to do spiritual exercise as well as bodily exercise to be a healthy Christian.
1. RESTORATION GIVES US JOY AND MAKES US USEFUL TO GOD
12 Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
13 Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.
David had known God’s presence, and he had known times when it seemed God was far away. I won’t spend time here to discuss eternal security, and I’m not certain David would have much to say on it one way or the other. He is dealing here with the real experience of loss of the tangible benefits of salvation — fellowship with God. And he is tortured by the knowledge that he was the one who walked away from that relationship. Now he is asking for a restoration to the point of full enjoyment of God in his life.
The next verse gives us a pointer to David’s sincerity. He knows that his experience of failure and restoration will teach others. When a believer gives a witness, sometimes people will gain more from confessed failures than all the successes we want to talk about. David’s story is not just an interesting bit of narrative to move the Bible story along — it is there as a warning and a source of hope.
2. RESTORATION GIVES US SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO TALK ABOUT
14 Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
15 O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.
Of course, David has Uriah on his conscience. But there are others affected by his sins. His newborn child dies. Other men died with Uriah. We’re not talking about a one-off here. Others will die, including more of David’s family in the future. After all, he did tell Nathan that the guilty man would repay four fold for his act.
David does not want to be a murderer ever again, in any form, and when he introduces these words — tongue, lips, mouth — I can’t help but recall what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount about an evil word against a person was equivalent to murder, and in James 3:6:
“And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell. 7 For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: 8 But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. 9 Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God.”
A restored tongue, however, gives praise to God, and we should openly declare our relationship with him.
3. RESTORATION MOVES US AWAY FROM EMPTY RITUAL
16 For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.
17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
David is making some real progress here, almost taking up a New Testament thought. I doubt any Old Testament person fully appreciated that animal sacrifices were forward-looking pictures of the death of Jesus Christ for sin, but it is more than possible that David understood, without the involvement of the heart, all sacrifices were just empty rituals. God says the same things in several places, and this is about as close to New Testament-style thinking as any Israelite in David’s time is going to get. How prone we are to unthinking legalism and turning good spiritual disciplines into mindless rituals. Preaching the gospel to ourselves, as Jerry Bridges and others put it, reminds us of our tendency to sin and drives us back to God, who, when approached with a broken heart, is open to us.
4. RESTORATION RESULTS IN GOD’S WILL ACCOMPLISHED
18 Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem.
19 Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.
A historical note here — the city of Jerusalem as the dwelling place of God with a glorious temple is still mostly a dream, David’s dream, as this psalm is being composed. David’s sins put that goal in jeopardy. In a way, then, the restoration of David is a metaphor for the restoration of Jerusalem and his dream, and vice versa. The idea here is that when the spiritual relationship is restored, the sacrifices become meaningful again. Again, there is some New Testament theology breaking through in these verses when you compare Romans 12:1: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”
Making a careful study of Psalm 51, and making its reading a frequent part of your devotional life is healthy. It helps with the idea of preaching the gospel to yourself — that is, reminding us of our tendency to sin and need for continual forgiveness, renewal, and restoration. Not like a yoyo merely going up and down, you understand, but rather more like a person playing with a yoyo going up a staircase. Even when the yoyo is on the way down the string, it is gradually making its way upward. In any human’s life with God, there will be asterisks, hopefully few like the Uriah business, but keeping the thoughts of Psalm 51 close we can avoid and minimize them.